FPIF Special Report
March 2004

Paradigm Shift or Paradigm Twist? The Impact of the Bush Doctrine on Canada

By Stephen Clarkson and Maria Banda
Stephen Clarkson is a Professor of Political Science and Maria Banda is completing her B.A. in international relations at the University of Toronto. This special report from Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) was originally presented at the conference at York University entitled Canada, Free Trade and Deep Integration in North America: Revitalizing Democracy, Upholding the Public Good, October 14-16, 2003 sponsored by the The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. This special report will appear in Ricardo Grinspun (ed.), The Slippery Slope: Canada Free Trade and Deep Integration in North America, (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming).

Introduction

Many aspects of the catastrophe that struck the United States on September 11, 2001 were not novel. Terrorism was as old as the perception of political oppression by the militantly aggrieved, and global terrorism had been a reality for two decades. Even global terrorism aiming at American targets was well established. What was new about the attacks was the United States' humiliation at having its own civilian airplanes used as missiles guided by Osama bin-Laden's adepts who were admitted to the country by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), having slipped through the fingers of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and then trained at free-enterprise flying schools without the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) managing to understand what was being perpetrated.

The incineration of New York's World Trade Center (site of American global financial power), the destruction at the Pentagon (headquarters for American global military might), and the near miss on Congress or the White House (control centers of American global hegemony) were not just a feat whose symbolism reverberated in all corners of the earth. More important for our concerns in this paper, the attacks had a transformative impact on the American public who finally realized that even the United States was vulnerable to the darker sides of globalization.

The resulting seismic shift in Americans' consciousness presented the Bush administration with the opportunity to effect a radical shift in the U.S. government's policy hierarchy. Having spent eight months since his installation as president of the United States without a clear plan to implement his conservative beliefs, George W. Bush was suddenly handed a rationale with which to justify bolstering the state's coercive and police power at home and to remilitarize American policy abroad. With national security legitimating its unilateralist proclivities under the slogan of a war against terrorism, a fervently neoconservative White House “found a threat and built a world order around it.” 1

The Bush administration's shift from economic liberalization to national security was shrewdly conceived, deftly executed, masterfully marketed, and overwhelmingly popular. But unlike previous paradigm shifts such as the move to Keynesianism half a century before, it was far from stable. National security rapidly passed through three variants, focused successively on

• prevention, building up domestic counter-terrorism (homeland security measures taken after September 11, 2001)
• retribution, legitimizing diplomatically sanctioned military force (intervention to destroy the Taliban government in Afghanistan)
• pre-emption, implementing the unilateralist Bush Doctrine (war to achieve regime change in Iraq)

Before assessing the impact on Canadian autonomy of the interactions between Washington and Ottawa at each of these phases of the new U.S. policy order, we need to understand the conjuncture established by the economic liberalization paradigm that still prevailed on the eve of the catastrophe.

I. Economic Liberalization

In the year 2000, general elections in all three countries of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) heralded what seemed to be a new stage in a clear trend toward more institutionalized continental governance.

Least surprising was the re-election in October of Jean Chrétien's right-of-center Liberal Party. His third consecutive majority in the House of Commons suggested that Canada would be able to move quickly on any change to deepen or broaden continental, hemispheric, or global liberalization that the “threepeat” prime minister endorsed. For the most part, Canada-U.S. relations were functioning according to what a former U.S. ambassador had called “the wheel that didn't squeak” theory, 2 a seamless, “intermestic,” and interdependent relationship between two similar countries equally committed to market integration. Although the paradigms in the two developed North American neighbors were congruent, reflecting not just deep integration but considerable ideological compatibility, Ottawa became concerned toward the end of the year that the specialness of its U.S. relationship was being pre-empted by Mexico.

At issue was right-wing Vicente Fox's dramatic electoral victory in July. In his campaign to oust the PRI after 71 years in power, the governor of Guanajuanto had vowed to set Mexico more firmly on the path of a neoconservative liberalization, which included ambitious proposals for further continental integration. 3 That President Fox's “Vision 20/20” for a NAFTA Plus of European-Union-like institutions might capture the Mexico-U.S., if not the continental, agenda was heralded in December, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared Texas governor, George W. Bush, president of the United States.

The new president and his foreign policy advisers, who had vowed to proceed “from the firm ground of the national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community,” 4 soon announced their opposition to the Kyoto Accord, abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and unsigned the U.S. accession to the International Criminal Court. But limits to this retreat from the global were set by the interdependence practiced by their own transnational corporations (TNCs), which required access to energy, raw materials, and cheap labor both abroad for their globalized production networks and at home. Since Mexico provided cheap labor south of the Rio Grande as well as in the form of some four million undocumented workers who had slipped across the border, the U.S. had “firm-ground” interest in regularizing its labor situation.

Fox managed to change Mexico's relationship with Washington because Bush, with his affinity for Mexico--the one foreign country about which he had personal knowledge--was a continentalization president as opposed to Clinton, the “globalization president.” 5 His enthusiastic reception in the White House and in Congress seemed to signal U.S. acceptance of his migration/labor agenda and Canada's definitive eclipse. But the date of this triumph was September 6, 2001, and Osama bin Laden had already set in motion a scheme so traumatizing that it would replace the U.S. commitment to trade liberalization with a policy hierarchy far less palatable to its neighbors both to the south and to the north.

II. Prevention: National Security at Home

The Bush administration's conception of “homeland security” initially focused on the domestic front, first buttressing the resources of first responders and then strengthening intelligence, immigration, and police services--the institutional complex of the CIA, INS, and FBI that had allowed the martyrs of jihad to complete their mission. It was this set of issues that we identify as the counter-terrorism variant of the new national security paradigm.

a. North America: Continental Security

The rise of counter-terrorism to paradigmatic status was confirmed by the creation in Washington of a new set of security-themed institutions. The U.S. Attorney General set up the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force. The Department of Justice established another 150 terrorism task forces. A color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System was put in place for public consumption. 6 Final evidence of a new policy hierarchy was a mega-ministry, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created out of 22, separate, existing agencies in March 2003 to give counter-terrorism its institutional base within the beltway.

Since the Americans' understanding of “security” was territorially defined, actions of an obsessive U.S. government unconstrained by economic concerns 7 threatened the very essence of continental integration that the previous paradigm set had relentlessly fostered. To the dismay of their own business community, members of Congress refused to entertain “economic security” as one of the objectives of the DHS. It was only after a major lobbying effort by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the token position of “Special Assistant to the Secretary (Private Sector)” was established.

Economic liberalization could be downgraded, but it could not be entirely jettisoned. Washington soon relaxed its blockade in the interest of its own corporate sector, whose entire system of just-in-time production was jeopardized by bottlenecks at America’s land borders, seaports, and airports—50% of the one million containers arriving yearly at the port of Montreal, for instance, were destined for U.S. locations.8

The United States’ response to the terrorist attacks put its reconfigured national security paradigm in conflict with the world order it had constructed with its allies after World War II. While no country trading with the United States was unaffected, nowhere was the effect of the American paradigm shift more direct than on its immediate neighbors, since the paradigm in which “security trumps trade” directly jeopardized the previous project to erase economic borders within an integrated North American market. The two NAFTA peripheries had already reconfigured their own policy orders in response to Washington’s demands that they deregulate and further open their already highly exposed economies to U.S. investment. Since close to 90% of Canada’s exports were going to the United States, the temporary shutdown of the U.S. border stunned Canadian TNCs, whose survival now depended on maintaining uninterrupted transcontinental trade and personnel flows.

For Canada, the shock of September 11 was not the loss of 23 fellow citizens in the World Trade Center's wreckage. The specter that haunted Ottawa was another shutdown of its territorial borders, an event which would nullify the whole project of securing access to the U.S. market for unimpeded trade in the hope that the Canadian economy would become an attractive site for foreign direct investment, thereby closing its chronic productivity gap.

Since terrorists could be lurking within its multiracial communities, the government of Canada knew it was perceived as being of greater concern to the United States than its southern neighbor. Washington’s rapid elevation of the national security paradigm produced a different security assessment in Ottawa, which saw a “Mexicanization” (read: militarization) of the world’s longest putatively undefended borderix as a more serious threat to its short- and long-term stability than al Qaeda.

So when Ottawa gave urgent priority to toughening counter-terrorism policies, it was less because Canadians feared al Qaeda, than because the government was desperately trying to rescue its neoconservative economic paradigm. 10 To restore unhindered commerce, the United States had to be satisfied that the border with Canada was secure enough to meet its homeland security concerns.

Ottawa thus quickly elevated counter-terrorism to the top of its policy hierarchy, which meant tightening immigration policy, passing extensive anti-terrorism legislation, enhancing border controls, and stepping up law enforcement and intelligence cooperation with Washington . Institutional support to ensure these measures were effectively implemented was provided by the prime minister's creating an ad hoc Cabinet Committee on Public Security and Anti-Terrorism in October. Chaired by Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley, the committee was responsible for coordinating significant improvements to border infrastructure, introducing high-tech programs to speed the cross-border flow of low-risk vehicles and people, and buttressing other security measures.

In subsequent weeks, intense negotiations between Washington and Ottawa came to grips with specific security questions, many of which had been promised in a series of border agreements signed between 1997 and 1999, but subsequently ignored--such as the Canada-U.S. Border Vision Initiative focused on immigration and smuggling, a Cross-Border Crime Forum on law enforcement cooperation, and a Canada-U.S. Partnership (CUSP). With business associations lobbying desperately for measures that would preserve their project of economic liberalization by simultaneously speeding up border traffic and enhancing security, Canadian diplomats in Washington claimed that the bulk of the proposals that formed the basis of a 30-Point Smart Border Plan that was ultimately signed by Homeland Security Adviser Tom Ridge and John Manley in Ottawa on December 12, 2001 had been made in Canada. Ottawa also established a Border Task Force for its implementation. A favorable half-year progress report was released on June 28, 2002, followed by a one-year status report on the Smart Border Action Plan on December 6, 2002. 11

In addition to U.S. government measures implementing the established Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT), Canadian trade-facilitating initiatives included such programs as Canada Customs and Revenue Agency's Customs Self-Assessment (CSA) to reduce border pressure through pre-approval of low-risk traders, implemented on December 6, 2001 after several years of planning. At the Bush-Chrétien meeting in September 2002, the two leaders jointly announced the launch of Free and Secure Trade (FAST)--a program to facilitate commercial flows that was built on the two earlier initiatives (the CSA and C-TPAT). Under another program, NEXUS, fast lanes for low-risk pre-cleared travelers were opened in June 2002 at two border crossings.

Fiscal corroboration of the counter-terrorism policy set's elevation to priority status in Ottawa was the $7.7 billion allocated over five years for anti-terrorism plus border infrastructure and security measures in the special budget Finance Minister Paul Martin announced in December. 12

Although Ottawa's responses to U.S. security concerns had been motivated by its perceived economic vulnerability, a shared consensus about the danger of terrorism meant that Canada suffered little loss of autonomy. Canadian officials were relieved that Washington was finally taking its northern border seriously enough to heed the proposals to accelerate economic flows while improving security--proposals that they had been making for nearly a decade. The government's actions had general public support tempered by human and civil rights activists' concerns about the measures' impact on the civil liberties of the public at large and human rights of would-be refugees and immigrants who would suffer from more stringent scrutiny and tougher entry requirements.

Fears that Washington would insist on Canada cooperating to create a much-touted continental security perimeter that would have American officials breathing down the necks of their Canadian counterparts to ensure that U.S. security was not compromised seemed exaggerated. In practice it became clear that, far from being the “Club Med for terrorists,” Canada had been the transit point for none of September's deadly hijackers. During his visit to Ottawa in December 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft had even acknowledged Canada 's security forces' efficacy in warning the United States of an earlier terrorist, Ahmed Ressam, who was accordingly picked up as he crossed the border en route to bomb the Los Angeles airport.

Canada's swift response in reordering its domestic policy set in congruence with the new U.S. paradigm was also facilitated by historical attitudes. As in the cold war, Ottawa found itself on the familiar terrain of having to coordinate, if not harmonize, policies with an enemy-obsessed Washington. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the nature of the threat, the players, the ideologies, and the theater of war had all changed beyond recognition, but the old patterns of asymmetrical cooperation reappeared once the U.S. declared a new version of national security to be its overriding preoccupation. This cold war response was strong enough to have the federal government rush to strengthen its counter-terrorism capacities, but Ottawa was not Pavlovian enough to conform immediately to American plans for beefing up its continental military security.

b. North America: Continental Defense

The real Pavlovians were in the Pentagon, where they insisted on defining anti-terrorist security in military terms. The military form that Washington gave its new security paradigm domestically could be seen in the sweeping reorganization of America 's internal defenses that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had initiated. The decision announced on April 17, 2002 to create Northern Command (Northcom) 13--a defense mega-structure integrating all four American forces in the United States, with responsibility for the geographic area stretching from the North Pole to Guatemala and part of the Caribbean--placed Canada in a quandary because of its discomfort with using the military to deal with what it considered an essentially non-military threat.

Ottawa was publicly reluctant and officially noncommittal about deeper continental military integration. Commentators were dubious about Northcom's implications for the existing structure of bilateral defense cooperation, 14 and Ottawa initially resisted endorsing either an extension of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) or the U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) program to weaponize space.

Within the Department of National Defence (DND), however, there was strong support for further integration and increased interoperability of Canadian forces with the Americans. For over a decade, the Canadian federal government had cashed in on the so-called peace dividend with which the end of the cold war had been hailed. Cutting spending on the military was easy to do when there was no perceived need for armed forces. As for Canada's claimed expertise in peacekeeping, which requires well-armed, well-equipped, and well-trained forces, budget cuts had reduced the country's capacity in that regard as well. Without the capacity to engage in serious military operations on its own, the Canadian military naturally leaned to increased cooperation with the Americans, knowing that this would force begrudging politicians to reflate military budget allocations. Given the threat implicit in President Bush's you're-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, the Canadian military had good reason to fear they would be excluded from planning North American defenses if Canada did not wholeheartedly buy into all the Pentagon's prescriptions.

Ever since September 11, 2001, when the Canadian second-in-command at NORAD had happened to be in charge of North America's airspace, Canadian and American military personnel had been cooperating at an increased pace at NORAD. Canada's elaborate structure of reciprocal defense obligations with the United States that included over eighty treaty-level defense agreements, 250 memoranda of understanding, and 145 bilateral defense discussion fora 15 enabled it to re-engage with its neighbor without public deliberation--or notice.

As a result, the two countries agreed on December 5, 2002 to create a binational Planning Group--located at the NORAD/Northcom headquarters in Colorado Springs--to proceed unobtrusively with operationalizing the new phase of the old partnership. 16 The Group had no forces at its disposal. It was intended to prepare contingency plans for maritime and land threats and for military assistance to civilian authorities in emergencies. Although it was created outside the military structure of NORAD, there was notable personnel overlap: NORAD's Deputy Commander--a Canadian--was named the Director of the Planning Group. As a result, the two military partners' policy hierarchies remained nearly congruent in the continental theater.

Although Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart expressed an interest in defense cooperation with Mexico by expanding NORAD or even forming a bilateral defense alliance, 17 historic public suspicions and the military's reluctance, 18 dictated that the Mexican Defense Secretary immediately deny any intent to change any aspect of the bilateral military relationship. 19 For the time being, North American military integration remained a bilateral, Canada-U.S. enterprise based on the cold war principle of “defense against help,” which admonished Canadians to cooperate in defending against Uncle Sam's enemy lest he defend Canada himself and on his own terms.

While a defense-against-help arrangement put the hegemon in the driver's seat, it still left the junior partner some autonomy to decide how many resources to devote to defense and where to allocate them. It also presumed that the enemy of the United States was also viewed by Canadians as their enemy. As the Bush administration moved from retribution to pre-emption, it became clear that there were limits beyond which every imagined enemy of the United States was not considered a valid foe by the government of Canada.

III. Retribution and Pre-emption:
Military Force for Regime Change

Whereas the September 11 attacks were understood abroad as sabotage requiring a defensive stance to be achieved by transnational cooperation among intelligence agencies, immigration services, and police forces, the Bush administration constructed them as acts of war requiring first retribution and then pre-emption through armed intervention. Moving immediately to assert its institutional primacy, the Pentagon insisted that military force prevail over undercover intelligence operations as the prime agent for achieving U.S. security. The ascent of the military could be seen from its budgetary allocations, which by 2001 stood at $390 billion, exceeding the combined expenditures of the next fourteen largest military spenders on the planet. 20 This reaffirmed military might was directed against two Muslim countries-- Afghanistan and Iraq, but with quite different effects on Canada.

a. Afghanistan: The Global Defense Paradigm

Within a month of the attacks, George W. Bush linked his rhetorical “war on terrorism” to an actual battleground. With Secretary of State Colin Powell promising a clear mission and credibly tying the barbaric Taliban regime in Afghanistan to al Qaeda, the White House assembled a multilateral “coalition of the willing” to topple the Muslim fundamentalist government. As a result, 136 countries offered a range of military assistance to Operation Enduring Freedom, which began on October 7, 2001.

Washington's military-force approach seemed valid enough to make Ottawa decide by early 2002 to send 750 Canadian soldiers from the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry Regiment to be deployed around Kandahar as part of a U.S. Army task force. Canadian troops had a history of fighting with the Americans. In the only post-cold war examples (Bosnia and Kosovo), they had formed part of multilateral forces under UN or NATO mandates. Afghanistan was an American mission, and the Canadians were fully integrated under U.S. command. Many in Canada were appalled at the implications for international treaty obligations of fighting for rather than just with the Americans, who had already decided not to abide by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. From first handing over the captured Taliban fighters to the U.S. in contravention of international law, to covertly deploying the elite JTF-2 military unit, to losing troops in an American “friendly fire” incident for which President Bush issued an offensively belated apology, Canadian participation was controversial. The operation of naval units in the Arabian Gulf region under Canadian command was less contentious, though more critical for the coalition's success. 21

Canada's dispatch of naval, land, and air forces to Afghanistan and surrounding areas was built on 60 years of participating in a multilateral defense relationship with the United States that NATO had institutionalized. 22 In this second stage of the Bush administration's promotion of a security paradigm based on military force, Ottawa's decisions ensured that the Canadian policy order remained congruent, if not identical, with that of the U.S., although its continuingly low level of budgetary allocations for the military showed that Canada's heart was not committed to remilitarizing its policy set. Despite its slow initial response, Canada's intervention in Afghanistan thus wrote another chapter in a long story of subservient defense cooperation with its neighbor in which Ottawa collaborates, spending as little as it can manage while still expecting economic favors from Washington in return.

This time, economic favors were not forthcoming. On the contrary, the Canadian contribution to the American war on terror in Afghanistan was met with higher U.S. duties on British Columbian lumber and prairie wheat. Expecting Brownie points for offering victims to friendly fire, Canada received a punch in the face.

c. Iraq: The Pre-Emptive Defense Variant

The war in Afghanistan provided the first application for the doctrine that President Bush had articulated at West Point in June 2002. Formalized in the National Security Strategy issued in September, it showed that a hard-line, military-weighted approach centered in the Pentagon had won out over the softer, diplomacy-led variant championed by the Department of State. The unilateralist, Straussean, anti-détente policy network from the old Reagan administration (Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy-Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the arch-hawks Richard Perle and John Bolton of the American Enterprise Institute) elbowed aside the moderate, multilateralist community led by Colin Powell and his director of policy planning, Richard Haass.

The outcome of this beltway struggle made a world of difference to Canada. The official commitment of the Bush White House to the pre-emptive use of military power was at odds with Canada's foreign policy rationale. Canada's “voice opportunities” 23 closed down as American liberal internationalism was silenced. Unlike the diplomatic and economic arenas where its influence corresponded to its considerable size, Canada was a pygmy in the realm of military power. 24

As long as the United States sought the international community's support at the United Nations, it seemed to have subordinated its military- to its diplomacy-led approach under Colin Powell's guidance. But the third variant of the new national security paradigm made pre-emption the policy of choice for countering terrorism. Once it became obvious that American diplomacy at the UN was merely aimed at securing cover for a war that Canadian diplomacy was trying to avert, the discrepancy between the U.S. and its unwilling partner's policy hierarchies became fully apparent.

The gap between the hegemon and its neighbor's policy sets became too difficult to bridge when the Bush administration elevated the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to the top of its security agenda. 25 The White House's determination to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime was at odds with the Canadian government's non-interventionist view of non-proliferation. When the Bush administration then announced that it would enforce regime change even if Iraq voluntarily disarmed, nothing could make the two policy orders congruent. The world got “marching orders from Bush and not a common vision,” so was disinclined to stay in step. 26

As the United States moved to promote regime change, Canada intensified its diplomatic activity. Rooted in traditional soft-power doctrines of multilateral diplomacy, respect for international organizations, primacy of international law, trade, and aid, Canadian diplomats made concerted efforts in multilateral fora to avert the looming crisis, first by preventing an irreparable schism in NATO, and then in putting forward a compromise resolution at the United Nations.

Reverting to its instinctive helpful fixer role, Canada allied itself with its third NAFTA partner, whose seat on the Security Council placed it in the global limelight. While diverging from Washington's paradigm variant, Ottawa's position converged with that of Mexico City, and the two peripheries coordinated their efforts to find a diplomatic alternative to war. During an official visit to Mexico in late February, Prime Minister Chrétien discussed his proposal for a more precisely detailed and extended ultimatum with President Fox and even telephoned President Vargas in Santiago about it since Chile was also serving on the Security Council. Mexican Foreign Minister Derbez raised the Canadian proposal with Powell the next week in a meeting in Washington. 27

But the Bush administration interpreted its neighbor's goodwill in trying to bridge the transatlantic divide as unhelpful meddling. Ambassador Cellucci said Canada's proposal for a new UN resolution giving Mr. Hussein a March 28 deadline to comply was “not particularly helpful” because it would allow Iraq to hold out longer: “We can't let this go on forever.” 28 The United States shot down Canada's compromise resolution even though elements of it made their way into Prime Minister Tony Blair's own last-minute effort to salvage peace. After much wavering, Chrétien's decision not to participate in the U.S.-led military coalition for “Iraqi freedom” drew the withering scorn of the neoconservative establishment in Washington and its flaks in the media.

Security assurances for Uncle Sam through border and immigration controls such as the Safe Third Country Agreement were still the sine qua non for good bilateral relations, but there were limits to how far the northern periphery would go solely in the interest of assuaging its demanding neighbor.

For the first time since the early 1980s, Ottawa did not revise its policy hierarchy in at least symbolic synchrony with the new doctrine in Washington whose view of the world it had generally shared. The Liberal budget on February 18, 2003 indicated that its spending priorities were more socio-economic than military. When the Department of National Defence decided in February 2003 to deploy 1,200 Canadian troops as peace-builders to Afghanistan, it sought the help of NATO and a European partner: Canadians would not be in Kabul under American command. Then the Canadian government openly defied a White House committed to an uncompromisingly militarized position on Iraq. Bush's goal of disarmament and regime change drew an uncharacteristically sharp, public response from the Canadian prime minister, who warned that U.S. unilateralism would undermine the United Nations. 29

But, Canada's own policy order was far from securely based, since pro-war sentiment in the west clashed with staunch opposition in Quebec. U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci's rebuke unsettled the Canadian domestic political order, strengthening right-wing critics in the House of Commons and emboldening the premiers of Ontario and Alberta to voice their support for the U.S. war in Iraq. Business leaders who feared U.S. retaliation in the form of border blockages, clamored for Canada's military participation in or at least rhetorical support for the U.S. war. 30 The disappointment was actually misplaced, considering Canada's already significant contribution to the multilateral forces in the Gulf region. As Cellucci himself pointed out, “Ironically, the Canadians indirectly provide more support for us in Iraq than most of those 46 countries that are fully supporting us.” Canada's military contribution put it right after Britain and Australia in the coalition.

U.S. anger nonetheless had a direct effect on domestic Canadian public opinion seen in the media hype, business doomsayers, conservative premiers' attacks, and the federal leadership race--a situation not witnessed since the episodes of Canadian-American discord during the Diefenbaker and Trudeau years. 31 Following Cellucci's rebuke, the approval of the prime minister's handling of the situation “declined a significant 10 points” since the previous week's polling.

Because President Bush had made it clear that countries were either “with us or against us” in his war on terror, many took Cellucci's “disappointment” with Ottawa for a veiled menace of retaliation. The cancellation of President Bush's first official trip to Canada scheduled for May 2003 was perceived as the first punishment, so the threat was taken as serious by those who did not notice that the same stern message had been delivered to a number of other unwilling capitals from Brazilia to Berlin. In fact, the United States was far more annoyed with Mexico, whose diplomatic support in the Security Council it had taken for granted. 32 While other countries' American relations might have suffered a greater setback than Canada's, whose policy sets had been more congruent until Washington broke the global consensus with its venture in Iraq, Jean Chrétien's decision was initially less popular since 48% of Canadians supported Bush's war.

Conclusions

Two years after the felling of the World Trade Center, the impact on Canada of America's most far-reaching security reconfiguration since 1945 remains unclear. We can nevertheless draw some inferences about four issues: the special characteristics of Canada as a neighbor to the world's only superpower, its capacity for autonomy, the nature of governance in the continent, and the consequent prospects facing Canada's relations with the United States.

The Unique Intermesticity of the North American Periphery

Analyzing only one country during a specific historical moment incurs the risk of ascribing uniqueness to phenomena that exist in other states or at other times. Canada was not alone in having to respond to three consecutive shifts in the paradigm hierarchy of the global hyper-puissance following September 2001. Many of its responses resembled those of Mexico or European states, which also tightened their airport security, scoured their underground for terrorists, and cooperated with American counter-terrorism efforts. Cooperation was extended when the United States militarized its homeland security paradigm with its intervention in Afghanistan . The UN Security Council debates on Iraq from October 2002 to March 2003 that alienated Canada from the United States also estranged the other North American periphery and created a schism in the Atlantic alliance that fragmented the European Union.

Notwithstanding the fact that, as “the key recruitment, planning, and logistics base for the attacks,” 33 Europe posed the greater security threat to the U.S., it was Canada that felt compelled to reorder its domestic policy hierarchies in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Even by early 2003, the EU was only beginning to implement substantial changes. The Iraq crisis may have harmed France and Germany's relations with Washington much more than it had Canada's, but the fear of U.S. retribution was felt more acutely by the global superpower's neighbor.

What makes Canada-U.S. teamwork in Afghanistan different from that of the Korean War and the squabble over Iraq different from the disagreements about Vietnam was the presence of NAFTA as a common external constitution 34 tying the two countries into a formalized, interdependent relationship that placed definite limits on the weaker player's ability to define its policies but also definite constraints on the hegemon's freedom to punish deviant behavior.

Complex interdependence in North America seemed to oblige Washington to tolerate its neighbors' obstreperous policy mores, even when they resisted its own national-security priorities. It is beyond the scope of this text to pursue the hypothesis that the potential for Canada's autonomy lay in its intermestic interdependence with Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, it is worth recalling that, in 2001, U.S. exports to Ontario alone were worth twice as much as those to Japan. Canadians imported $5,254 worth of U.S. products per capita, and 37 states had Canada as their largest single trading partner. Seventeen percent of U.S. crude oil imports came from Canada. Prolonged border congestion would quickly wreak disaster in many key border states and “make Mr. Bush a one-term wonder.” 35

Convergence versus Autonomy

Implicit in tracking the metamorphoses of American policy sets was the question whether a home-grown domestic paradigm order was still sustainable in a weaker country living in a deeply interdependent relationship with the global hegemon. “Free trade” was designed to accelerate Canada's convergence to common U.S. standards. Furthermore, Washington's increased assertiveness in the aftermath of September 11 could have been expected to intensify this process, making incongruent paradigms in the peripheries untenable.

The hypothesis was persuasive. “Hegemony sits in tension with the principle of equality,” 36 and the shift after September 11 ended the NAFTA-generated illusion that its neighbors had equal voice with the Unites States in the construction of the continent's paradigm order. The post-September 11 progression of the three variants of the U.S. national security paradigm forced its periphery into a reactive mode, in which immediate responses were required to forestall the damaging actions of an aroused Uncle Sam. In an insidious dynamic, allegedly poor security in the peripheries was making the United States feel more vulnerable, while its strong homeland security measures were making its neighbors more vulnerable, compelling them to seek congruence with the U.S. paradigm.

The actual outcome was counterintuitive, demonstrating the paradoxical power of the weak. Despite all these pressures to converge, the southern periphery, though weaker and poorer, showed more autonomy than the northern one, which followed in lockstep every shift in the U.S. paradigm variant until late 2002.

For Canada, the chief evidence of divergence from the U.S. paradigm was its short-lived diplomatic activism, which coincided with and responded to the highpoint of American unilateralism. Soon after Washington declared the Iraq war won, this brief assertion of a separate Canadian way was followed by actions signaling that Ottawa wanted to re-establish close relations with the U.S. It moved toward endorsing NMD, and hurriedly announced a $100-million contribution to the reconstruction of Iraq, which, when thought too stingy to impress the White House, was soon followed by another $200 million. Whether these fence-mending efforts were prompted by exaggerated fears of U.S. economic retaliation is immaterial. The point for our analysis is this: Ottawa was under such political and corporate pressure that, after its declaration of temporary independence, it hurriedly reordered its policy mix to re-establish congruence with the policy priorities of its continental leader.

It is equally germane to remember that the Canadian prime minister's efforts at rapprochement were less than wholehearted. He pushed ahead with his domestic program, that included one item to which the Bush administration openly objected, the decriminalization of possessing small amounts of marijuana. He added insult to injury by signaling the federal government would legislate to institute a Canada-wide norm backing up the Ontario court ruling that sanctioned the marriage of same-sex partners, a prospect deeply offensive to social conservatives in Washington . And to make it clear that, unlike British Prime Minster Tony Blair, he was in no way George Bush's poodle, he went out of his way before the G7/G8 Summit at Evian in June to criticize the Americans for their huge budget deficit.

Continental Governance or Government by States?

The United States' reconstitution of its policy set around homeland security in the aftermath of September 11 also confirmed the continent's failed institutionalization and continuing dual bilateralism. While the 30 points in the Canada-U.S. border plan were conveyed through Canadian diplomatic channels as a courtesy to the Mexican government, they were formally put forward as a template by Washington for the Mexico-U.S. border. They were neither discussed nor adopted though a trilateral process. President Fox's November 2001 suggestion of a common “North American Security Policy” was ignored. 37 Whether the hegemon preferred not to deal with both neighbors at the same table or whether the two peripheries preferred to treat separately with Uncle Sam, North American governance in the age of counter-terrorism still consisted of the two hub-and-spoke bilateral relations with little significant interaction along the Ottawa–Mexico City rim, except for their intense collaboration in the Security Council during the winter of 2003.

NAFTA had served as the conduit to increase awareness in Ottawa and Mexico City of their shared vulnerabilities as well as their common interest in containing their common neighbor. The Iraq crisis triggered a genuine attempt at cooperation by the two U.S. peripheries as their foreign policies converged, while an equally strong and shared opposition to Washington's Indochina quagmire some 30 years earlier had not.

The trilateral relationship, which had developed when NAFTA was being negotiated, remained officially in place while the three domestic paradigms were congruent under economic liberalization. But without EU-style institutions, North American governance could not mature through institutional means. Conceived “as a simple, narrow, stand-alone agreement on foreign trade” 38 and empowered with rules but not institutions, NAFTA had accelerated market integration in the short term without having the institutional substance to cope with emerging problems in the longer term.

When the World Trade Center attacks ended the continent-wide conception of policy priorities, U.S.-centered bilateralism took over. The re-emergence of an assertive, militarized U.S. hegemony forced continental governance into retreat. North American economic integration--and the whole project of continental governance--remained a creature of its constituent states.

Given Mexico's preference for multilateral-bilateralism and Canada's traditional counterweight strategy, this third dyad could become increasingly important as a complement to each periphery's vital U.S. relationship and so provide NAFTA with an intergovernmental--if not institutionalized or supranational--base to diffuse American preponderance through solidarity of the weak.

If another leap forward is to follow the failed trilateralism and revived bilateralism resulting from Ground Zero--a kind of reculer pour mieux sauter--the three states of North America will need to achieve some consensus on their respective policy hierarchies. Paradigm congruence could occur if Washington realigned its policy set with Ottawa's and Mexico City's, a possibility that would have to await regime change in Washington. If the Bush Doctrine continues to provide the script for a continuingly aggressive global unilateralism unacceptable both to Mexicans and Canadians, then the peripheries' capacity to develop independent policy sets could perpetuate lasting paradigm conflict.

If the price for further integration is satisfying Washington about its security, big business will readily accept whatever schemes are thought necessary, but the public might not. Such a split is certain to complicate Prime Minister Paul Martin's life. The integrationist Canadian business community that financed his leadership aspirations may want to enact every type of continental accommodation from customs and currency union to continental security perimeter and armed services' integration. But the values and attitudes of the Canadian public are diverging from those of their American neighbors, so Martin's integrationist proclivities will have to be contained lest they jeopardize his party's electoral chances.

With such dim prospects for continental convergence, the likelihood of a new dawning of continental paradigm stability is even dimmer. The source of paradigm turbulence was the radicalism of the Republican party's Washington leadership and the institutional primacy of a militant Pentagon and White House. The domestically polarizing effects of the Bush Republicans' radical global agenda have prevented the kind of paradigm entrenchment that depends on a bipartisan consensus about its basic assumptions. The combination of paradigm instability at the center and paradigm dissonance with its periphery suggested that the post-September 11 future of continental governance for North America was far from rosy.

Prospects for Canadian-American Relations

Even if this paradigm dissonance had seriously negative implications for those hoping to move North America toward a European Union model of governance, it did not threaten Canada's relationship with the United States as greatly. Ottawa had responded expeditiously and effectively when Washington's paradigm shift had redefined the agenda for border control. The Canadian government then balked when the zealots driving the Bush administration turned paradigm shift to paradigm twist in an effort to settle old scores with Saddam Hussein and impose their formula for freedom on the Middle East. Chrétien's decision not to support the U.S. war of regime change in Iraq caused the already frosty relations between the two countries' leaders to deteriorate further. This personal tension in Canadian-American relations was not expected to outlast Chrétien's term in office. Whether the misunderstanding and ideological disconnect, which was manifested in Canada's immediate isolation by a frosty Washington, would have longer-term implications would depend on what happened in both the Oval and the Prime Minister's Offices. No one could know whether Martin in office would subscribe to the Bush Doctrine. Nor could anyone know whether bilateral relations could be smoothed by the U.S. presidency moving toward the Canadian position either in a more moderate second Bush term or in a Democrat revising U.S. policy.

As for the deeper, structural aspects of the Canadian-American relationship, they would be affected as much by the perennial realities of the economic liberalization paradigm as by the continuing disputes over softwood lumber and the Canadian Wheat Board, or by pressures to completely re-institutionalize the dyadic partnership.

Author's Note: The research for this chapter was accomplished in large part thanks to the support of the Dean of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It is based on 26 interviews in Washington, DC, and 12 in Mexico City, carried out in April 2003. A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at the Learned Societies Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on June 1, 2003.

Endnotes

1. John Ikenberry cited in Dudley Althaus, “Our changed world: Terror shifts diplomatic priorities.” The Houston Chronicle ( Sept. 8, 2002): 24.
2. Gordon Giffin, “Remarks to the Canadian-American Business Council” ( Feb. 4, 2002 ), The Canadian American Business Council at http://www.canambusco.org/giffin.html .
3. Fox and his foreign minister, the political scientist Jorge Castañeda, endorsed Robert Pastor's proposals to correct NAFTA's institutional deficit while fostering Mexico's development with capital, trade, and aid. The plan included a customs union, considerable policy coordination, trans-border labor mobility, and supranational institutions that could transfer funds to Mexico from its richer partners for renovating its generally rudimentary infrastructure. Robert Pastor, Towards a North American Community (Washington: Institute for International Economics, 2001).
4. Michael Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2002): 32.
5. Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” 30.
6. Jonathan Stevenson, “How Europe and America Defend Themselves,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2003): 78. Other institutional changes took the form of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives committee reorganizations.
7. Confidential interview, April 11, 2003.
8. Stephen Flynn, “America the Vulnerable,” Foreign Affairs 81 (Jan./Feb. 2002), 64-5, cited in Earl H. Fry and Jared Bybee, “NAFTA 2002: A Cost/Benefit Analysis for the United States, Canada, and Mexico,” Canadian-American Public Policy 49 (2002): 33.
9. For an overview of the two plans and their differences: Christina Gabriel, Jimena Jimenez, and Laura Macdonald, “The Politics of the North American Security Perimeter: Convergence or Divergence in Border Control Politics,” Ottawa: Carleton University (2003).
10. The most wide-reaching proposals came from the right-wing think-tanks and business associations, which proselytized for measures going as far as a continental security perimeter and defence integration: Wendy Dobson, “Shaping the Future of the North American Economic Space: A Framework for Action.” Commentary – Border Papers C.D. Howe Institute (April 2002); J.L. Granatstein, “A Friendly Agreement in Advance: Canada-U.S Defence Relations Past, Present, and Future." Commentary – Border Papers, C.D. Howe Institute (June 2002).
11. “Canada and the United States Sign Smart Border Declaration,” Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade News Release No. 162 (Dec. 12, 2001).
12. Partners in North America, 90.
13. Northcom became operational on October 1, 2002.
14. SCFAIT and a number of other observers were sceptical about this opaque process, whose broader implications were not understood even by the government's policymakers: “Recommendation 11,” Partners in North America, 106.
15. Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada (1985), 182, cited in Partners in North America , 100.
16. Confidential interview.
17. Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart (July 17, 2002), cited in Luis Alegre, “Bajo la sombra militar de EU,” El Norte (Monterrey, México: Sept. 29, 2002), 7.
18. Confidential interview.
19. Alegre, “Bajo la sombra militar de EU,” 7.
20. See Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” 37. U.S. defense spending makes up 36% of the world total: Bernardo Sepúlveda, “Terrorismo transnacional y seguridad colectiva,” in Fernández de Castro, Cambio y continuidad, 23-44.
21. Confidential interview.
22. Stephen Clarkson, “The View from the Attic: Towards a Gated Continental Community?” in Andreas and Bierstecker, Re-Bordering North America?
23. John Ikenberry cited in Thomas Risse, “Beyond Iraq: Challenges to the Transatlantic Security Community,” AICGS/German-American Dialogue Working Paper Series (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, John Hopkins University, 2003): 8.
24. NATO Secretary-General George Robertson cited in Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” 38.
25. Ikenberry, “ America's Imperial Ambition,” 56.
26. Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” 28.
27. Fox had also “styled himself in the role of broker, trying to bridge the differences between the Anglo-American perspective and the others: ‘We have to convince the United States that we have alternatives to attain the objective of disarming Iraq … What we believe is that we still have time in formulas and proposals to do what we have to do without a war'” (Brian Laghi, “Fox warns of economic cost of war,” Globe and Mail ( Feb. 28, 2003 )).
28. Ambassador Cellucci stated that Canada's proposal for a new UN resolution, giving Mr. Hussein a March 28 deadline to comply, “is not particularly helpful,” as it would allow Iraq to hold out longer: “We can't let this go on forever” (Colin Perkel, “U.S.-Canada relationship could suffer, Cellucci says,” Globe and Mail (Mar. 1, 2003): A9.
29. Brian Laghi and Paul Koring, “Chrétien and Bush clash over regime change,” Globe and Mail , (Mar. 1, 2003); Laghi, “Unilateral war could cripple UN, PM says,” Globe and Mail (Feb. 28, 2003). However, even Chrétien's own foreign minister then exclaimed that Canada backed regime change.
30. Richard Sanders, “Who says we're not at war?” Globe and Mail (March 31, 2003), A15. It was mainly political symbolism and moral support that the White House was expecting from its “close friend and ally.”
31. “A Country Divided on War in Iraq,” Ipsos-Reid at http://www.ipsos-reid.com/media/dsp_displaypr_cdn.cfm?id_to_view=1780.
32. Interview with Sidney Weintraub, April 9, 2003.
33. Stevenson, “How Europe and America Defend Themselves,” 80.
34. Stephen Clarkson, “Canada's Secret Constitution: NAFTA, WTO and the End of Sovereignty,” (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, October 2002).
35. Michael Den Tandt, “Trade as crucial to the U.S. as to Canada,” Globe and Mail (March 27, 2003): B2.
36. Michael J. Glennon, “Why the Security Council Failed,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2003): 29.
37. Serrano, “U.S.-Mexico Security Relations in the 21st Century.”
38. Jeff Faux, “Corporate Control of North America: And How to Bring NAFTA under Popular Governance,” The American Prospect 13:24 (Jan. 13, 2003).

Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2004. All rights reserved. Recommended Citation Stephen Clarkson and Maria Banda, “Paradigm Shift or Paradigm Twist? The Impact of the Bush Doctrine on Canada,” Foreign Policy In Focus (Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, March 2004). Web location: http://www.fpif.org/papers/2004canada.html Production Information Writer: Stephen Clarkson and Maria Banda Editor: John Gershman, IRC Layout: Tonya Cannariato, IRC

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